These prices don't make a lot of sense in proportion. The shopkeeper also bids me "warm tear" when I leave the shop. Even a loaf of bread is 320, which makes me think the economy is really out of whack. A light helmet sells for 1,200 and a suit of leather armor sells for 1,800. In the first shop, my 2000 gold suddenly doesn't seem all that much. For now, I have to assume DragonBlade came first and play it first.įollowing Borminh's instructions, I head south and soon come to a town. My attempts to contact the author have not been answered. GayBlade is listed as a 1992 game on a lot of sites, but I've found comments from the author that he based it on DragonBlade (1993), and moreover only released it after he got into a rights battle with the publisher of his Citadel of the Dead (1994). Lance wanted me to play GayBlade, one of the games he managed to turn up. I gave the choice of the next game to commenter Lance M., who's helped me a lot lately with "lost" games. Both seem to have done well for themselves, however, with successful technology careers in the San Francisco Bay area. Vawter hinted in an e-mail to me that they started one based on the Seven Wonders of the World but didn't get very far. It's too bad that Norsehelm never produced another game. PC Games (March 1993) had the only complimentary review, recommending it for its replayability and challenging strategy. Other reviews simply suggested that the reviewer wasn't really aware of roguelike history and was looking for fancy graphics and sound. The lowest score came from the February 1993 PC Joker, where the reviewer compared it to a flight simulator and seemed to find the number of keyboard commands bewildering despite mouse buttons, including a help menu, right on the screen. I couldn't find any contemporary American reviews. Their London publisher, Optyk, apparently never sent them any royalties, so the duo decided to offer it as freeware after a few years of modest income. Norsehelm was their company, meaning they self-published and self-distributed the game in the United States, albeit with (as we see above) commercial production values. Omega (1988) remains the best roguelike I've played so far, but Ragnarok is a close second, and frankly a better game for a player who wants a tighter storyline.Ī slick ad for what was essentially a shareware game.Īs we now know, Ragnarok was a passion project of two California-based college friends, Thomas Boyd and Robert Vawter, and I thank both of them for offering comments and recollections during my coverage. That gives us a final score of 50, six points higher than I gave NetHack. The game lasted exactly as long as its content supported. Limiting saves to once every 200 turns is just about perfect. It offers the challenge of a roguelike without the insanity of permadeath. It's mostly nonlinear and quite replayable. Graphics are a step up from most roguelikes sound is sparse and only okay. I like the way the main interface shows both a large-scale and small-scale area. One command=one key, logically mapped, but with a mouse backup. It gets almost all of it for the excellent interface.
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